Abstract

This work is dedicated to the house La Ricarda, a work by the architect Antonio Bonet Castellana. The house is the result of a particular program that combines family lite with meetings and social celebration. lt is settled on a landscape that is central to the way lite and celebrations are held. The aim of this thesis has been to record the qualities found in the house, researching from three different approaches, that have resulted as three different chapters.
The first approach was based on an unpublished document: the Correspondence between client and architect. During the 14 years of duration of the project, the architect resides in Argentina. The letters are a very special material that opens the history of the house from the point of view of the travel and the project from a distance: a design based on letters that are plans and drawings to explain its construction. These letters, in turn, speak of a way ot life and the education envisioned for their children, which combines artistic culture with nature. Antonio Bonet and his client, Ricardo Gomis, had never met before, but the friends hip that grows between them through letters, leaves a testimony of the construction of this so exceptional project. The correspondence, kept by the Gomis family, can rebuild much of the evolution of the project, in an attempt to explain what 1 think happened.
A second chapter is formed by the Observation Papers, a series of registration documents of the oeuvre, made from direct observation, to measure and to draw the house as it is today. Because the house has not been modified or altered since it was finished in 1963, drawn documents have record the work exactly as it was built, in its original condition. Each of these documents completely registers an aspect of the house, reflecting it on one piece of paper. They are hand drawings of various sizes, A1, NJ or even larger, made during several years. In addition to these plans, 1 built a model on the same scale as the one built by Bonet in 1953: a 1:100 scale. This model measures 1.30 x 1.30 meters plan!, and about 15 centimeters high, and includes the platform that forms the foundation of the house and the pine forest.
The third element of this thesis is a calendar, drawn from the need to physically see and extend such a long time in the history of this project, since the first proposal made by the architect, until the first years of inhabiting the house. The calendar shows the time contained in this project, the various times that coexist in the development of the house: from the beginning to its construction, making visible the time dedicated by Bonet simultaneously to this project and other activities, other projects, trips, conferences, cultural and personal environment.
The subtitle of the thesis, a formalized territory, wants to name the result from this close and long relations hip between Antonio Bonet and their clients Gomis-Bertrand. The correspondence is defining a house to live in direct relation to the territory where raising children and having friends, where freedom of movement and action has no physical limitations, is a house with no doors, "a house studied to walk through it'' as Antonio Bonet says in his first letter. The proposed house, is not complete without understanding that its daily life is built on something invisible: the discipline and codes that organize and dignify a living opened to a wild and primitive natural environment, inside a pine forest, over sand dunes, nearby the sea

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